Thoughts on Interpretation of Art

I've been shadow teaching a philosophy of art class this semester, and today the issue of the interpretation of art came up. Now, it seems that this often in practice gets reduced to the two following options: either the artist's intent determines the meaning of the artwork, or because we can't get into the artist's mind, it's all about the audience. Granted, this is an oversimplification, but what about the artwork itself? Why do we need to go beyond it to either the artist or the audience? Alternatively, what sense could it make to say that interpretation is left largely to either the artist or audience?

Any artwork is already delimited, structured in some way. Even if I only mark a black line on a piece of paper, I still have structured that line and that paper in a given way. Even if I have left the paper blank, the paper is then blank rather than filled. So every artwork, in virtue of being an artwork, is already structured, some (like a Mozart symphony) more so than others (like John Cage's 4'33").

Any artwork is also by its very nature public. The marks, the texture, the rhythm of an artwork is something that's been put out there in some shared space using, to at least some extent, some shared symbolism or set of markings. If I write a poem, I am using language to write it. This language is not my own, but part of a larger context. The act of putting down words creates something that goes outside of myself; it means something regardless of my intention. I can write a poem and discover a meaning which I did not intend, and this seems to be a legitimate meaning of the poem. This does not mean that there is a completely determinate reading of the poem, or that there even in principle exists a definitive interpretation (there can be irreducible ambiguity and underdetermination), but merely that there is this particular form put down, one which is shared in the community, rather than some other form.

Any interpretation of an artwork must be of the artwork. If I am sitting down and watching The Purple Rose of Cairo, and I turn to a friend to talk about it, and she responds with an analysis of Jedis and the Force, then she is not giving me a bad interpretation of a Woody Allen film; she is giving me an interpretation of a different film altogether. If any artwork has a certain structure, then an interpretation must be of that structure, whether it be a line or a portrait or a blank canvas, a chant or a concerto or a folk song, etc., and so on down to the details of the individual artwork.

The biggest problem is finding the proper context of the artwork. Language is public, so if I write a poem, I have written down something with a meaning beyond what I or the audience want. But what happens when the language changes? This becomes a difficult issue, because I can no longer simply say that the author wanted the artwork to be a certain way and so that is how we should take it. The artwork is the starting point of analysis, and it is here and now this public, structured object.

For example, take the line from The Tempest: "Oh brave new world, that has such people in 't!" What is the meaning of "brave"? If I were to take it in a modern context, it would mean something like "courageous", but this word meant "good, splendid" in Shakespeare's time (cf. the Italian "bravo"). One option would be to use the context that gives the artwork the most force (admittedly a notion that needs much more development): I use the standard of Elizabethan English in interpreting Shakespeare because his plays make more sense that way. I know what a splendid world would be, and this suits Miranda's amazement in the scene in which she speaks this sentence, but I have no idea what a courageous world is and the sense I can make of the phrase doesn't fit the play.

A Bach fugue, as a Baroque piece of music, would have used terraced dynamics in its time period; that is, the individual instruments don't get louder or softer, but instrumentation is added and reduced to change the volume. But unlike the Shakespeare example, it seems possible that using later notions of dynamics in which individual instruments change volume may constitute a more powerful (more aesthetic? more coherent? I'm still searching for the right word) rendition of the score. It may not, but the possibility is open, in which case it would seem at least that there is some aspect, some potentiality of the score which Bach himself might not have noticed. The reason why this seems more likely in music than in literature may be that language is a highly complex phenomenon and changing the rules (say, by going from Elizabethan to Modern American English) is most likely going to reduce the coherence of a given piece.

The nature of interpretation will change from artwork to artwork as well. It does not need to be conceptual and linguistic. The interpretation of Stravinsky doesn't have to be a dissertation; it can simply be a certain playing of the score. Any interpretation of a painting will be, at some level, simply an appreciation of the specific way in which the brush strokes have fallen. Interpreting the artwork on these non-cognitive levels doesn't mean that there can't also be cognitive interpretations as well. In fact, on my current proposal, any way in which one interprets the given artwork (which, remember, necessarily entails that one pay attention the publicly given structure which is the artwork) is a legitimate interpretation of that artwork.